0Energenie Mi|Home

I decided to try expand­ing my smartHome setup with some cheap­er smart­plugs from Ener­genie. Below I sum­mar­ise my find­ings so far.

The first thing to note is that there are 2 sys­tems out there called MiHome. One is by Ener­gie, and the oth­er is by Xiaomi. When you’re look­ing for the Android App it is very easy to con­fuse the 2. Make sure you sign up for the cor­rect sys­tem when you first set up

The sys­tem I got came with 3 plugs, a remote con­trol, and a hub. The plugs can be con­trolled with the remote con­trol (without the hub) and also from the hub, which enables access to the app.

One of my 3 plugs works very well and is very respons­ive. Anoth­er works almost all the time but can take 10–15 seconds to respond which is really too slow to be accept­able. the third plug usu­ally turns on but nev­er seems to turn off. Over­all I haven’t been very impressed — these devices need to work reli­ably, and respond with­in a second or 2 at most. Look­ing at reviews it looks like I am far from alone in hav­ing this issues, whilst oth­er people have had no prob­lems. Maybe qual­ity con­trol is an issue, or per­haps it depends on the radio envir­on­ment in the home. I have an old house with thick walls and as well as a mesh wifi net­work on the 2.4GHz range I also have a smartth­ings hub (Z‑Wave and Zig­bee), a couple of bluetooth devices, a cord­less tele­phone sys­tem, and 2 baby mon­it­ors. That makes for a very crowded spec­trum and I won­der if the MiHome sys­tem can­’t reli­ably com­mu­nic­ate amongst all this com­pet­i­tion. My Belkin WeeMo has always worked quickly and reli­ably so I could always get more of them in future, but they are rather pricey, so I will prob­ably invest­ig­ate oth­er cheap­er systems.